


a thousand paper cranes and a single wish

by jayeinacross



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-02
Updated: 2012-10-02
Packaged: 2017-11-15 11:57:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jayeinacross/pseuds/jayeinacross
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paper folds and tears so easily, just like people, fluttering in the wind, blown away by the slightest breeze. Life runs out and goes limp, breaks away into little pieces in the rain, fading and washing away. Like people, lying on cold tables and cold floors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a thousand paper cranes and a single wish

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at the [Firefly comment ficathon over at DW](http://meinterrupted.dreamwidth.org/631774.html).
> 
> Also written for my angst bingo prompt 'supernatural'.

Paper folds and tears so easily, just like people, fluttering in the wind, blown away by the slightest breeze. Life runs out and goes limp, breaks away into little pieces in the rain, fading and washing away. Like people, lying on cold tables and cold floors.

Inara shows River and Kaylee how to fold delicate paper, the thin patterned kind, and the three of them spend an evening making flowers and cranes. Inara is practised, and Kaylee turns out to be pretty good at it, if a little clumsy at first, but River’s the best. She’s never done this before, but her fingers move with more ease than even Inara, and soon enough, there’s a circle of perfectly folded birds on the table in front of her.

“It’s a tradition from Earth that was,” Inara explains, as they fold. “It was said that if one folded a thousand paper cranes, a single wish of theirs would be granted.” She tells the story of the little girl, the sick girl, who folds and folds and hopes and hopes.

“That’s a sad story, Inara. But it’s pretty, what she did.” Kaylee smiles, and River stares at the cranes.

“A thousand birds fly. Fly in the sky and take you away. To where you want to go. But she’s cold, cold, cold.”

She can see the ghost of that girl, a little girl who never finished her thousand cranes. Sick, sick like River, but not in the same way, but she’s cold too.

River starts folding cranes every day, with whatever paper she can find. Simon buys her more of the patterned ones when she tries to use pages from Book’s Bible, but she’s happy with anything. She’s always folding the squares into birds, ones as big as Jayne’s hands, and ones that don’t extend past the length of her fingernail. 

Kaylee and Inara join her in their spare time, she’s always hunched over the table in the kitchen or curled up on a couch with the paper in her hands. They teach the others too, even Jayne. Inara tells the story again of the girl again in her serene voice, and Kaylee patiently goes through the steps with Wash and Mal.

Cursing when he makes another wrong fold, Jayne almost crushes the half-folded bird in his hand, but River stops him with long fingers wrapped around his wrist.

“Hey, what are you--”

“Shhh.” River takes the paper, unfolds some of the creases, and the lines are still there, but she shapes it again, makes the right folds, and hands it back to Jayne. He grunts.

Jayne’s creased folded crane sits on top of the cabinets in the kitchen, surrounded by a wave of others - Mal’s wonky birds, with Inara’s precise and Kaylee’s bright, Wash’s a little clumsy. Kaylee has strings of them hanging from the ceiling in her room, Zoe’s neat and Simon’s a little unsteady, but River’s made the most. The cranes are everywhere in the ship, there’s not a room or corridor where a little one’s at least sitting on a crate or a pipe or hanging off a wire.

Many of them have wormed their way into the infirmary too; Kaylee put some in there, but River’s sneaked the most of them in. Simon likes his infirmary neat and organized, but he doesn’t mind the bursts of colour stuck to the sides of cabinets and lining the window ledges.

The infirmary is cold, too many sharp instruments that bring back the memories of needles and metal sinking into River’s head, into her brain, making her bleed and turning her cold too. But Simon’s warm, even when he’s in the infirmary, and when she peeks around the edge of the door, she sees him bring the warmth back to people when it’s fading too quick. His fingers work better with scalpels and needles better than with paper, but it’s just a different kind of paper - human skin, stitching it back together, like paper threads.

It shouldn’t work, but it does with Simon. Warm and cold at the same time, that’s just what Simon is. Hurt and heal and light and dark, and he lifts River out of the pit of spikes she’s fallen in, and even though she falls again, he’ll never let go, he’ll never let her fall away completely.

River hangs her thousandth crane above Simon’s bed. He walks in when she’s just finished tying it from the ceiling with string.

“River?”

“For you.” River jumps down from Simon’s bed lightly, smiles.

Simon smiles back. He reaches for her, and she steps into her hug, wraps her thin arms around his waist. “Thank you.”

Simon takes care of her, takes care of everyone, and wishes don’t make sense, but not much does anymore. Nobody knows cold like River does, and it is her wish that however much it may surround Simon, it will never seep into his bones, into his brain, like it has hers.

“For you,” River repeats.


End file.
